Editorial
Digital Marketing
How CMOs Can Defend Marketing Budgets in the AI Era
For more than two decades, Gary Lyng has shaped how enterprise technology categories come into being — naming markets before they fully exist and translating deep technology into commercial outcomes that endure.
His point of view comes from that work. In enterprise technology, the rarest skill isn't building great products. It's creating belief in what's possible, before the market knows it needs it. Categories are not won by the company with the best features. They are won by the company that names the problem first, draws the map clearly, and gives the market a vocabulary it didn't know it needed. Innovation that cannot be translated is innovation that stalls.
That conviction has produced category-defining work across Hitachi Vantara, SanDisk, NetApp, Dell EMC, HP, Veritas, Violin Systems, and Aparavi — including the IDC-recognized "Big Data Flash" category, with IBM, Facebook, AWS, Google, and Microsoft among its inaugural customers; Hitachi Vantara's repositioning from storage-led vendor to recognized Data and AI infrastructure leader, anchored by a named partnership on NVIDIA's stage; and category resets across stalled and fragmented businesses turned into commercial momentum.
He works with CEOs, boards, and executive teams to turn innovation into durable differentiation and predictable revenue, leading with narrative clarity, commercial instinct, high EQ, and a builder's approach to teams.
Gary is an award-winning marketing leader and product strategist writing about the evolution, challenges, and innovation possibilities of enterprise data management. He is also known for keynotes, writing, and interviews on his views on the balance of EQ and IQ, both in leadership and inspiring customers, partners, and organizations
Gary grew up in Bletchley, England — a small town that quietly carried an outsized history. It's where Alan Turing and the codebreakers of Bletchley Park cracked the Enigma cipher, an act many credit as the birth of modern computing. Something is fitting about growing up in the shadow of people who saw structure inside chaos before anyone else did.
He now calls the Bay Area home.